Based on Tragically Limited Intelligence

Toronota based desi band, Falak – who think therefore they resist – want you to know that at least one of the 9/11 hijackers was just a spurned lover. In their video for the song, Yadain II – Memories II – the band rocks, ‘how do I live after forgetting you?’ while the hijacker gets ready. The video, with the disclaimer ‘Based on Tragic Events’ is here.

hoopoe – point taken. Sorry for being sarcy earlier, it was one of those winter days. We’ve realized that mixing: (1) a limited budget, (2) limited experience, and (3) a complex idea is usually a bad idea. But truly many thanks for your comments (we enjoyed them more than we let on) and good wishes. Our fingers are crossed about our future videos; hopefully they won’t require annotation in quite the same way.

Obliged. In the company of professional historians and theorists, I find it unbefitting to comment on the subject of narratives.

1)Not to keen about notions of “collectiveness”

2)I understand your POV; I am well aware of the “otherization” and the act of fitting the highjacker’s image to the beaten, old trope of evil, evil men a la Nazis–though I do think that the execution was a little sloppy, which is to say, your clarifying comments here were more insightful than the video.

Hey, thanks for your comments too. We have doubts too about whether we were able to effectively communicate what we wanted to with the video. But we felt taking a kick at the can was better than remaining silent, especially when there is the potential of it leading to a broader conversation (does this qualify?). Hopefully, our next attempt will have better execution, and we look forward to experiencing your biting wit again.

Sadly, we don‚Äôt know of too many historians, journalists, film-makers or concerned citizens who are occult adepts. So very uncreatively, we suggest that understanding the hijackers‚Äô stories can utilize the same methods applied to understand those of the nearly 3000 victims of 9/11, or any other tragedy where the victims don‚Äôt survive to convey their own narratives. If death extinguished historical investigation and insight we would be living in a truly shallow world. Lucky for us, history is more resilient than even Orwellian or Stalinesque attempts at purging all public records along with people. This is not to suggest that our video is a factual documentary, but as noted, it is only symbolic of the near absence of such investigation.

And we truly are sorry to disturb Adorno, Marx and Che‚Äôs slumber. But who knows, perhaps Adorno would even approve of the critical potential and unacceptability of the video. Ruffling Jinnah‚Äôs conservative feathers, however, we‚Äôre a little bit less sorry about.

” Third, if we don‚Äôt try to recover the ‚Äòhidden‚Äô humanity of the individuals involved in these events and fail to understand the stories, emotions and histories behind them, we will never be able to prevent such tragedies from happening again, or from occurring in the first place.” I am very sympathetic to that sentiment. I have my doubts, however, that the depiction in your video does that successfully.

Yet, thank you kindly for your comments. I wish you all the best and I do hope that it generates the convesation you intend in the self-consciously apolitical scene of cosmpolitan Pakistan.

Yadein is a song about loss, and that’s primarily what we wanted to reflect in our video. Only we also chose to politicize traditional notions of loss (i.e., the spurned lover writing poetry).

On one level 9/11was obviously an inherently political act. And the powers that be have co-opted the tragedy and loss of these events as justifications for their own political agendas. The mass media in North American has attempted, in their own way, to tell the human story of the obvious victims of this tragedy. But the popular media treatments of 9/11 also demonstrate the lamentable loss of something else: the stories and basic humanity of those involved in these events as the perpetrators. We feel that by failing to take account of the humanity of the perpetrators, we run three very dangerous risks. First, the diminishment or loss of our collective humanity, for in not recognizing the human element of such actions we dehumanize not just the perpetrators but also ourselves. Second, the prejudiced attribution of such acts not to humanized individuals but to an undefined collective ‘other’, thereby imputing guilt to entire social groups on the basis of nothing more than religion, garb or skin-colour etc. Third, if we don’t try to recover the ‚Äòhidden‚Äô humanity of the individuals involved in these events and fail to understand the stories, emotions and histories behind them, we will never be able to prevent such tragedies from happening again, or from occurring in the first place.

The video is not, nor is it meant to be, a strictly factual portrayal, but a symbolic one. Nor is it meant to depict a spurned lover; but rather someone leaving behind the kind of existing essential relationships that defines our interaction with the world and each other. But you take from it what you will.

In our opinion, any act of culture production comes with, for better or for worse, a measure of power to influence its ‚Äòconsumers‚Äô. As such, we chose to tell a story that we felt was important, rather than hack away crafting something involving a celibate monk painting on a mountain top. The video was primarily meant for consumption in the local pop-culture scene of cosmopolitan Pakistan, and operate as a challenge for a scene that is very self-consciously apolitical. Whether it will have any actual impact we can’t really say.

There, hopefully now you have a better idea of what hell is wrong with us. Apologies for the long post.

’tis true. love is ay perilous affair. when them electrochemical shits is going herkyjerky in the brain (I’ve read that National Geographic cover story on brain chemistry and love), anything’s possible–though, I rather prefer those days when spurned lovers wrote poetry or painted or became monks due to their dejection.